Collaborations don't come much more extreme than Eonnagata. Co-created and performed by ballerina Sylvie Guillem, choreographer Russell Maliphant, and theatrical wizard Robert Lepage, this is not only a production that brings together three stellar artists, it is one that has been conceived as a shared adventure, a mission to channel the trio's talents into new terrain.

Guillem, swaggeringly glamorous in crimson silk, thus gets to narrate the work's opening prologue; Lepage dances while Maliphant shows off his sword-fighting skills. In their combined mix of dance and physical theatre none of the participants look quite as we have ever seen them. But while parts of the production are startlingly beautiful, touching and brave, parts betray the hesitancies of artists not fully in control of their medium.

The story that drives the work is the life of the Chevalier D'Eon, a soldier, spy and diplomat who was a favourite at the court of Louis XV until he was forced to flee to London and earn his living in a circus. But what was most extraordinary about the Chevalier was that he was a transvestite, who not only carried out his spying missions disguised as a woman, but who also (by choice and by royal edict) wore dresses in his daily life. His was a world that had many parallels to that of the Japanese onnagata – the male Kabuki actor trained to perform female roles. And it's from this starting point that the work alternates between telling the story of the Chevalier and meditating on the agonies and pleasures of a soul divided between sexual identities.

This is all incredibly rich material, but it is a lot for a 90-minute work to carry. Even with the aid of Alexander McQueen's extraordinary fantasy of gender bendering, culture-crossing costumes and the vivid poetry of Michael Hulls's lighting designs, some of the work's many short scenes fail to deliver the intensity or clarity of information required.

It's not a problem that all three performers represent different aspects of D'Eon, but it's not always clear whether other characters are involved. For instance, is the imperiously bewigged and painted Lepage meant to be Catherine the Great, being fooled by the young Chevalier, or the latter's mature self? Confusions like this are compounded by the fact that some of the spoken monologues are only semi audible, and that some of more abstract dance sections seem irrelevant.

Yet where this production works, its imagery and its execution can be magical. The duet between Guillem and Maliphant, showing the two halves of D'Eon trying to morph back into a single body; the solo for Guillem which has her ferociously and wittily wielding a pen as though it were the sword with which the Chevalier longs to vanquish his enemies; the mix of sensuous delight and anguished fury with which he dons his female clothes.

Most extraordinary is the moment where the elderly Chevalier conjures up his former selves and Guillem and Maliphant, summoning their own most astonishing technical virtuosity, dance a mirror duet before seeming to physically slither, dissolve and vanish from sight. The Chevalier is left alone to die, splayed out on the autopsy table, as a single beam of light rakes cruelly over his body. It is a heart-rending scene and one of several moments that confirm there is a character in the middle of this complicated production with the power to fascinate and move. But Eonnagata still feels like a work in progress, and its character hasn't yet come into focus.

He was an 18th-century spy who loved to cross-dress and swordfight. Who better to stage his life than Sylvie Guillem, Alexander McQueen, Russell Maliphant and Robert Lepage? They tell Judith Mackrell how they pulled it off